Voice chat (will there be one)?

Ever experienced the moment where you had to explain something to someone and the person either didn't or couldn't read group/party chat and things went wrong and something bad happened? Or you just couldn't type because of the hotbar spamming?

DDO had ingame voice chat that didnt require 3rd party programs like TS or Vent and it worked nice. Will there ever be anything like that in TSW?

Ever experienced the moment where you had to explain something to someone and the person either didn't or couldn't read group/party chat and things went wrong and something bad happened? Or you just couldn't type because of the hotbar spamming?

DDO had ingame voice chat that didnt require 3rd party programs like TS or Vent and it worked nice. Will there ever be anything like that in TSW?

Confirmed not to be. On the grounds that it takes too much resources away from other development when excellent tools like Ventrilo and Team Speak exists, that is more than likely to do the job much better. Most in-game voice chats suck donkey balls. The only advantage is that you can turn it on and speak to anyone when necessary. The greatest disadvantage is people can turn it on and speak to anyone at any time. I'm sure ignore lists would reach new lengths =)

Hm, I had very good experience from it in ddo at least. If the community is mature then there should be no problems, I find it only easier tbh. For example, we had our guild vent on all the time, but in raids and quests ( and they actually require group communication) hitting button and saying something to party member was most efficient way to explain something. And you won't have that person on your vent, just for the quest you are doing. It also worked only in party chat ( well only party members could use it ).

And that ignore list, bah, if the content filters players , what is the chance of actually ignoring someone? Never understood why would someone be a total ass ingame...

I loved LOTRO's in-game chat. Simple to use. It just worked. You could only chat with people in your group or raid, so if you don't like what they're saying, then just kick 'em. Same as in regular chat.

I really hate the idea of TS or Vent. It's just another program to run outside of the game for communication, and if you're a game developer and find that people have to use 3rd party programs to enjoy your game, then, at least in that respect, you have failed your users.

Honestly, all MMOs should come with chat built-in to the game. Nowadays, there's no excuse not to. There's turnkey solutions that can be used. The developers just need to create the in-game UI and plug into the API. Not too difficult.

Eh, DDO voicechat still has major issues. Sound equalization being one of the big ones. You can't turn people's volume up or down, just one master volume slide. SWG had no built-in voice chat and the community worked just fine. People went in together and got large Ventrilo servers for their server/faction, set up guild channels in them, etc.

Built-in voicechat could be wonderful if done right, but there's already programs out there that do it right which are easily accessible. The devs could take time to integrate one of the many solutions into the game, but chances are there would be big problems with it and no matter how well they did, there would always be people who didn't like it. Best to let everyone choose the solution that works best for them and focus on the game itself.

Also, TeamSpeak3 is easy to run even from a home PC. I'm sure most of us have broadband connections, which can easily handle the traffic. If you happen to have a second PC, or a media center hooked up to your TV, you can run the server in the background without it really doing much to the overall performance of the machine (within reason; If you're trying to host several hundred people at once, you might want a dedicated server at a colocation center).

Are you serious there is no party voice chat, as in you can link a reference to this info?

The lack of in-game voice chat is one of the biggest killers of SWTOR, makes any sort of pug grouping completely fail. Having to type everything out, especially in combat, is impossible for difficult fights. Expecting people to attempt to organise that type of coordination with typing is completely lame. All it does is enforce the clique of insular, exclusionary guilds and no random teamups at all.

From all the info we've been given, TSW is a game that has even more requirement for coordination, thanks to the state system, which sounds absolutely awesome but if you can't give a heads up to team mates that you are about to set off a certain state they can take advantage of... BAD.

The comment about it being difficult to add doesn't really sound correct, since there are many easily includable libraries, including the Teamspeak library, that make adding this type of thing relatively trivial. That's what they are made for.

I'm actually glad that they're not wasting resources on an ingame voicechat-function. There's two reasons for this:

1: it probably won't be used anyway, since people and especially guilds are more inclined to use Vent/Mumble/TeamSpeak

2: It's damn near impossible to get anything else than basic functionality out of it, i.e. no individual volume-control for each person etc.

That, and as mention before, it's an utter immersion-breaker for RP'ers, which I suspect there will be plenty of in TSW. Just about damn near ALL of the ingame-voicechat systems I've tried have also been a major source of lag. You also don't need to have a voicechat-system when doing encounters/dungeons. Sure, it makes it easier, but it's by no means someting that's needed. Unless you want to rush through it as fast as possible, of course....